Lianlian DigiTech Agent Wallet Bets on B2B Agentic Payments

What happened

Lianlian DigiTech, a Hangzhou-based cross-border payments company listed in Hong Kong, has put AI agents at the center of its next growth plan. Its interim filing for the first half of 2026 describes an Agent Wallet platform built for "agentic commerce", where AI software carries out tasks and may start transactions for people or businesses.11 The company says the wallet handles the practical problems of letting software spend money: confirming an agent's identity, managing what it is authorized to do, setting transaction limits, controlling risk and keeping a record of each transaction.1112 The intended customers are AI product companies, Web3 businesses and large corporates.11

The wallet belongs to Lianlian's "AI Native + Globalization" strategy, which it presented at an investor day in Hangzhou in April. There, founder and CEO Zhang Zhengyu said the company would stop describing itself as a cross-border payments specialist and become an "AI-native global financial infrastructure provider."13 The filing also lists strategic cooperation agreements on agentic payments with Visa and UnionPay International, plus investments in AI-native startups. Neither the deal terms nor the investment amounts were disclosed.1112

Launched or still being built?

Coverage disagrees on how far along the product is. Crowdfund Insider and Small World FS, both working from the filing, say Lianlian is still developing the Agent Wallet.1112 Lianlian's own results release says the wallet was launched in the first half as payment infrastructure for "the agent era." It adds that work with Visa and UnionPay International moved agentic payments "from technical validation to live deployment."16 Fintech Hong Kong took the company's wording and also reported the product as launched.14

The most likely explanation is that both are partly true: there is a working product, but its scope is narrow. A Visa–Lianlian demonstration earlier in the summer supports that view. Industry roundups described it as China's first business-to-business agentic transaction, in which an AI agent found suppliers, compared them, placed an order and paid, all within preset controls.20 That shows the system can complete a transaction. It does not show that customers are using it in volume, and Lianlian has published no figures on agent-initiated payment volume.

How the pitch changed between April and August

The company's language shifted over four months. In April, Lianlian said the Agent Wallet would let AI agents "initiate, approve, and settle transactions without human intervention," covering machine-to-machine value exchange in fully automated payment loops.1315 The August filing puts more weight on authorization management, transaction limits and traceability.11 This may simply be a difference between investor-day ambition and a regulatory filing. Even so, it follows the direction of the wider industry, where networks have learned that spending controls and dispute handling matter more to adoption than full autonomy.

That is probably the right instinct. Consumers are reluctant to hand payment decisions to software. Research commissioned by ACI Worldwide found that only 7% of US and UK fashion shoppers would let an AI assistant buy without approval, even under preset conditions. More than half said they were uncomfortable with AI buying for them at all.9 Another write-up of the data says about 53% would not allow AI to buy on their behalf in any form. Shoppers were much more interested in price comparisons and price-drop alerts.7

Lianlian is aiming at business buyers, not shoppers

The most important thing about Lianlian's plan is who it is for. It is not building a consumer shopping assistant. Its stated customers are AI companies, Web3 firms and large enterprises, and its showcase transaction was business procurement.1120 One industry analysis argues that enterprise purchasing may be among the first large-scale uses of AI agents in payments.20

That choice avoids much of the trust problem that is holding back consumer AI shopping. A company that sets procurement rules, approved-supplier lists and spending limits has already defined most of what an agent is allowed to do. Lianlian's existing business fits this market. In the first half, it focused on high-value enterprise clients and on both B2B goods trade and services trade.16

It has also been using AI agents inside its own operations, including cross-border compliance reviews, risk screening, treasury management, customs reviews and customer service.11 Lianlian therefore knows the back-office side of trade finance, which is where business-to-business agent payments would actually be used.

A crowded field led by the card networks

Lianlian is entering a market where Western payment companies have already moved quickly. Between early March and mid-April 2026, Visa, Mastercard and American Express each launched programs for agent-initiated payments.1

• Visa introduced Intelligent Commerce Connect on April 8. It is a single integration that works across networks and lets merchants accept payments from agents using the Trusted Agent Protocol, Machine Payments Protocol, Agentic Commerce Protocol and Universal Commerce Protocol.2
• Mastercard released Verifiable Intent in March. It creates a tamper-resistant record connecting a shopper's identity, their instructions and the result of the transaction, and it sits on top of Agent Pay.1 In September, Mastercard added virtual cards that let agents buy online within limits set by the cardholder.9
• American Express released a developer kit and said it would cover errors made by AI agents.1
• Stripe brought out the Machine Payments Protocol and co-wrote the Agentic Commerce Protocol with OpenAI.1

An ACI Worldwide executive told Fortune the competition is "a land grab for infrastructure standards." Whoever sets the rules could keep the resulting transactions on their own networks for decades.9 The IMF has also weighed in. It describes agentic AI as a possible structural change in financial systems and names Visa's and Mastercard's "Know Your Agent" frameworks as the controls that keep authorization on established payment rails.3

With those standards largely set by US companies, Lianlian is unlikely to build its own competing network. Its more realistic role is as a connector between systems. Partnering with both Visa and UnionPay International puts it between the Western card networks and China's own network.11 The company calls itself a "neutral provider" of AI-native financial infrastructure for both human and machine-driven commerce.13 For Chinese exporters whose agents need to pay or get paid abroad, a licensed company that can work with both systems could be useful.

Licenses are its main advantage

Lianlian's strongest asset is its regulatory coverage. As of June it held 68 payment licenses and qualifications, served more than 200 countries and regions, and settled in more than 140 currencies.11 This year it added a Canadian money services business license through an acquisition in April and a Category 3D payment license in Dubai in May.1112 The company also says it is the only Chinese provider holding every state-level money transmitter license in the US. It points to its Virtual Asset Trading Platform license as the basis for blockchain-based services.16

Those licenses matter because agent payments still have to comply with the same rules as any other payment. Agent identity and transaction traceability, the two features Lianlian emphasizes, are what regulators will ask about when software moves money across borders. The company's April plan also combines conventional payments with Web3 and cross-border use of the digital renminbi.13 That gives it room to support stablecoin-based machine payments, which competitors are also exploring.6

The financial results

The core business is growing enough to pay for these experiments. First-half revenue rose 11.9% to RMB875.6 million. Global payments revenue grew 27.1% to RMB600.9 million on payment volume of RMB249.9 billion.11 Value-added services, helped by virtual bank cards, rose 83.2% to RMB164.2 million. Domestic payments revenue fell by about half after Lianlian dropped lower-margin business.1116

Coverage of profit varies with the measure used. Lianlian's release says adjusted operating profit rose 147.3% to RMB156 million and that the gross margin on global payments was 70.8%.16 Crowdfund Insider instead points to a steep drop in headline profit, to RMB10.9 million from RMB1.51 billion. The prior-year figure had been inflated by one-off gains tied to Lianlian's LianTong joint venture with American Express.11 Both figures are accurate. Without those one-off gains, the underlying business looks healthy.

What it means

The Agent Wallet is a reasonable bet, but Lianlian has not yet shown it will pay off. The company is not trying to persuade wary consumers to let a chatbot shop for them. It is offering agent payments to businesses that already use automated procurement and cross-border payments and already have spending rules in place. The Visa demonstration shows the approach can work technically, and the license portfolio gives Lianlian a credible position.

The gaps are clear. There are no usage figures and no financial terms for the partnerships, and the company itself has described the product as both in development and launched. The industry has also not settled who pays when an agent buys the wrong thing. When Fortune asked Mastercard who would be liable for an unauthorized purchase by an agent, the company pointed to its Verifiable Intent records and did not name a responsible party.9 Lianlian will need a better answer to that question for business clients than for consumers, because business purchases are larger and liability is usually set by contract. It should also start publishing agent-payment figures if it wants investors to see this as more than a feature added to a payments company.